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Traditionally, Brightstar had used emailed reports to share program information. Their goal was to empower clients by transforming this manual process into a highly collaborative, easy to use, self-service experience.

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Brightstar Halo, a global provider of device protection programs, was looking for a better way to share program performance data with its clients. Through increased transparency and accessibility, Brightstar hoped to further engage its existing customers while attracting new clients.

Brightstar chose DefinedLogic as the partner to bring their vision to life.

Discovery

The project began with a two-week discovery to explore what this new Brightstar product should be. What features would deliver the most value to their clients?

Through discovery workshops, the Brightstar and DefinedLogic teams imagined a client portal that would allow for ongoing collaboration and provide real time subscriber, claim, customer service and financial data. Security would be a critical requirement because of the sensitivity of Brightstar’s client data. The portal experience would also need to be responsive so that customers could access their data any time and from any device.

Using these key features as a guide, DefinedLogic developed sketches to illustrate what the primary portal screens might look like and how each of the key features could be supported in desktop and mobile experiences.

Planning for MVP

Using the key feature documentation and sketches from the discovery engagement, DefinedLogic sized the effort to build the portal and developed a high-level release plan for that work. Brighstar was anxious to get something out to their customers quickly so the plan focused on delivering the most important features first. This approach ensured that the minimum viable product (MVP) would be ready by Brightstar’s deadline.

Agile Development

As with most of our projects, DefinedLogic employed an agile process for delivering the Brightstar portal. Development was completed in two-week sprints with formal status meetings with Brightstar at the end of each one. In addition to these formal status meetings, quick check-ins were held every other day. The scope of the project was somewhat fluid and both teams regularly reviewed the backlog to track progress and to assess the impact of new or changed requirements. As larger pieces of functionality were completed, the DefinedLogic team demonstrated them to Brightstar to ensure that what was being built would deliver maximum value to their clients. This regular communication ensured that the DefinedLogic team always had clear direction and that Brightstar always knew how the project was progressing.

Power BI

A key requirement for the success of the Brightstar client portal was the ability to present Power BI reports. Power BI is a business analytics service provided by Microsoft. Brighstar’s analytics team was already using Power BI for program metric reporting and wanted to be able to surface the reports they had already created within the new portal.

Presenting Power BI reports in the portal posed both development and deployment challenges. On the development side, Power BI reports are not responsively rendered on different screen sizes. Therefore, custom handling of report layout changes based on the current screen width of the display device was required. On the deployment side, since the SQL Server Analysis Services data source was hosted within the Brightstar premises, embedding Power BI reports from the Azure cloud service posed a significant challenge in allowing the cloud-based report service to access the Brightstar internal data.

After researching and prototyping possible options, DefinedLogic determined the appropriate solution was to set up and configure a data gateway to broker authenticated data requests and responses securely through corporate firewalls.

Project Conclusion

Brightstar’s reporting portal, ReportIT, was delivered under budget and by Brightstar’s deadline. The first release includes the display of several key reporting metrics at varying levels of detail including presentation of 18 Power BI reports. The portal’s admin capabilities allow Brightstar account managers to regularly collaborate with their customers by uploading financial reports and entering custom free-form explanations of each month’s activity. The portal is highly secure and provides an exceptional user experience for all mobile devices.